The following review comes from regular Bandwidth Magazine contributer, John Wheeler

The Fountain is a film of one beginning and several ends. Darren Aronofsky never really shows the audience the distance between those points, but is content to show cause and effect without much journey in between.

But thatâ€™s not really a problem. The Fountain could have been an epic of disastrous proportions if Aronofsky had deigned to flesh out the adventure aspects which lie implied between the filmâ€™s opening and its three separate conclusions, separated by 500 years. As it stands at an hour and forty minutes, The Fountain is at a reasonable length for the kind of incomprehensible, staggeringly pretty story it wants to tell.

That prettiness, the stunning visuals that make it worth watching in full panamorphic widescreen at some high-end theater, comes at the beginning and the end of the filmâ€™s convoluted plot. Everything in between is effectively expendable because, contrary to popular opinion, Aronofsky is not a master storyteller.

Hugh Jackman plays three temporally different renditions of the same character, Tommy, all searching for the elixir of life to save Izzy (Rachel Weisz). Five hundred years ago, he is a conquistador who journeys to Central America for Queen Isabel. In the present, he becomes a surgeon trying to save his dying wife. And in the future, a bald version of Tommy journeys through space with an ancient tree in a giant bubble toward some initially indistinct end.

However, despite the dull segments in present day, the past and future stories are gorgeous to look at and Aronofksyâ€™s impeccable sense of the power of imagery is on full display. He recreates the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition in only one scene, but the moment is so over-the-top and stunning that it carries as much weight as an entire movie devoted to the subject.As with that one beautifully horrible moment, the rest of The Fountain carries Aronofskyâ€™s touch for an utter lack of subtlety. The visuals are stunning because they are so audacious and, because he avoided computer graphics, realistic in a surreal sense. The scenes in outer space are wonderful in the same quiet, simple sort of way that those in Kubrickâ€™s 2001: A Space Odyssey were. The movieâ€™s parallel storylines are visually connected in a way that never feels forced. Unfortunately the connections in dialogue and story always feel awkward because they are repeated ad nauseum. For a movie that wants to make itself very clear thematically and in terms of character development, it is also frustrating that The Fountain becomes indecipherable in the final minutes, opting for visual beauty instead of a real conclusion.

The Fountain is a movie that manages the rare feat of looking great as well as carrying a brain in its pretty little head. How unfortunate, then, that it can never quite find the words to express itself without stuttering and mumbling. The Fountain shows the emotional end of three connected stories, Aronofsky just isnâ€™t able to make sense of what it all means.

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